Double Take

Slow day to get going today. Tired legs and tired mind. In other words it was a Sunday.

I actually got up with good intentions this morning. I had a brick session to do, using the Kickr for the bike leg and last night I set my alarm with intent. Get up do this session, get on with the day. Once I was on the Kickr though, I just wasn't there. The legs were flat, the mind tired out. I got about halfway though my warm up and decided I needed to give my body a chance to get moving, so I got off and booked the session in for later in the day.

That later came this afternoon, when after a day of cleaning the house, running around, taking our daughter fishing for the first time, getting lost in a hardware store, finally finding the materials we wanted and building a fence with those materials, I found myself back on the Kickr.

Funnily enough I thought I might have found myself a bit shattered from what was a busy day, but the opposite was the case. I found that in contrast with this morning I had the mental focus to get into the session and get on with it. Which is what I did.

The bike had a slight hiccough when my daughter interrupted me because she couldn't find mum (mum was in the front yard) and I forgot to pause the bike computer, but other than that, once I got into the efforts they went fine. They actually felt better the more I did, which is always a nice place to be.

Off the bike and into the run and it was a bit of a combination of pacing using heart rate, like I was practising before Subic Bay, and pushing the effort chasing some speed in the tail end. All up the run finished up about bang on, with a nice negative split (helped a lot by a tail wind on the way home).

I am still deciding how I feel about starting the session, aborting it and coming back to it. Mentally I don't think it was a particuarly good approach. You can't stand up on the start line and say, 'wait, wait, I am not really feeling this, can I come back in an hour'. But at the same time I suspect that the session I did this afternoon was much better quality than it would have been if I had done it this morning. So there was a definite training benefit to it. Might leave the jury out on this one. 

With the running I have to say I am gaining a much better appreciation of pacing I think. In the past a lot of my running has been, 'I feel good so I will run fast', followed by 'I feel bad so I will run slow'. More recently though, with the aid of better heart rate tracking, I have started to learn that if I let myself relax at the start of the run, I might be running slower, but the controlled heart rate will reward me at the end, when I am feeling strong in the second half.

I know that sounds like a really basic thing to be learning now, and most people have been doing it for ages, but to be honest I just haven't really run using heart rate in the past. I have always tracked heart rate, but I have tended to use it as an analysis tool after a session, rather than during. Better to learn something late rather than never I guess.

Besides DIY and training a big chunk of my day has been spent on the Ironman tracker watching Ironman Melbourne. Pretty exciting race to watch, particularly in the pro women. Also some epic performances from a bunch of Perth folk, including a massive sub 10 hour Ironman by Peter Rees from Break Your Limits. Big congratulations to everyone who raced, always inspiring to watch.